Re: OpenMPE Minutes for October 9th. - Hewlett Packard

This is a discussion on Re: OpenMPE Minutes for October 9th. - Hewlett Packard ; On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:50:13 -0400, Wirt Atmar writes:
> As I've written before, having the OpenMPE committee agree to sign non-
> disclosure agreements was one of the dumbest mistakes that the
> committee could have ever made, ...

Re: OpenMPE Minutes for October 9th.

On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:50:13 -0400, Wirt Atmar writes:
> As I've written before, having the OpenMPE committee agree to sign non-
> disclosure agreements was one of the dumbest mistakes that the
> committee could have ever made, and in the end, could well be attributed
> to be the single greatest contributor to the death of MPE, beyond HP's
> own mishandlings of the product.

I, for one, have all but given up hope that OpenMPE will ever do anything that will lead to MPE living beyond HP. Almost seven years of haggling, pleading, begging, moaning, complaining, and griping (BMC) have done nothing to HP's steadfast refusal to part with anything even remotely related to MPE.

OpenMPE tied their own hands with the NDA and if anyone wishes to see MPE survive to fight another day, we need to get an emulator going so that the O/S is not beholden to some arcane, HP-controlled architecture. It is my personal opinion that even an emulator will not "save" MPE (in any business sense of the word), but only allow it to live as a hobbyist toy in the hands of a dedicated few.

It was to this end that Peter Eggers and I talked about writing an MPE emulator to run on Linux.

Re: OpenMPE Minutes for October 9th.

In message <597294.65053.qm@web30906.mail.mud.yahoo.com>, Jim Phillips writes
>On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:50:13 -0400, Wirt Atmar
> writes:
>
>> As I've written before, having the OpenMPE committee agree to sign non-
>> disclosure agreements was one of the dumbest mistakes that the
>> committee could have ever made, and in the end, could well be attributed
>> to be the single greatest contributor to the death of MPE, beyond HP's
>> own mishandlings of the product.
>
>
>
>I, for one, have all but given up hope that OpenMPE will ever do
>anything that will lead to MPE living beyond HP. Almost seven years of
>haggling, pleading, begging, moaning, complaining, and griping (BMC)
>have done nothing to HP's steadfast refusal to part with anything even
>remotely related to MPE.
>
>OpenMPE tied their own hands with the NDA and if anyone wishes to see
>MPE survive to fight another day, we need to get an emulator going so
>that the O/S is not beholden to some arcane, HP-controlled
>architecture. It is my personal opinion that even an emulator will not
>"save" MPE (in any business sense of the word), but only allow it to
>live as a hobbyist toy in the hands of a dedicated few.
>
>It was to this end that Peter Eggers and I talked about writing an MPE
>emulator to run on Linux.
>
>Jim

I probably don't know enough about emulators in general, but how, in
broad conceptual outline, would you go about this?

ISTM that you'd need to emulate the PA-RISC instruction set, but somehow
arrange for calls to devices outside of the CPU & memory (or maybe even
those as well) to map to devices as Linux understands them.

In which case, you'd also have an HPUX emulator there, at no extra cost.

But suppose you built such an emulator; where would you (legally) get
the MPE code to run on it from?

Roy
--
Roy Brown 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd useful, or believe to be beautiful' William Morris

Re: OpenMPE Minutes for October 9th.

It's not really an emulator - in some ways it's more than that, and in
other ways less.

Under 'more than that', for instance, it lets your code think it's still
running on Image, whereas really it can be running on Oracle.

Under 'less than that', it only provides a subset of MPE functionality,
all very much at what you might call the 'application' level - MPE
commands, a few emulated utilities, jobstreams, spooler.

All useful for an MPE application you have all the source code for, and
which you want to port to another platform as simply as possible,
without the ground-up redesign (and cost, risk and timescale) with which
that new platform seductively beckons.

But not suitable (AFAIK) for anything you only have the executables of,
like most commercial packages, or that relies on HP3000 utilities and
tools (e.g. Powerhouse, MPEX, Suprtool) that don't of themselves run on
your new platform.

Oh, and looking at that site with FF3/Adblock/Noscript made it look
pretty empty (even though I tired to turn off Adblock and Noscript and
maybe succeeded).

It needed IE before I could see any content - maybe because it hasn't
been touched since 2003?

--
Roy Brown 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd useful, or believe to be beautiful' William Morris